Should You Be Eating LSD for Breakfast?

Who needs coffee when you can start your day with powerful hallucinogens?

Put aside the over-easy egg, the lox and schmear, and even the chia seed pudding. If you want clarity and focus throughout your day, perhaps you should be eating powerful psychedelic drugs for breakfast.

That's if you believe a small group of scientists and psychonauts who have increasingly sung the praises of microdosing, or the ingestion of small amounts of LSD.

A recent Alternet feature by Phillip Smith delves into the phenomenon, crediting psychedelic researcher Dr. James Fadiman for popularizing the practice in his 2011 book The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys.

"Microdosing," writes Smith, "refers to taking extremely small doses of psychedelics, so small that the affects [sic] usually associated with such drugs are not evident or are 'sub-perceptual,' while going about one's daily activities. It's being done by anyone from harried professionals to extreme athletes to senior citizen businesswomen, and they're claiming serious benefits from it."

A Hunter S. Thompson-caliber ball-tripping dose of acid tends to fall in the 400-microgram realm, sending you into deep conversations with ancient platypus warrior spirits on planet Xenu. But Smith claims that a mere 10 to 15 micrograms can impart "increased focus, emotional clarity, and creativity" that your cup of cold brew can't.

Bonus effect: You won't get screamed at by disembodied eyeballs in your glove compartment.

During a speech at the "Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics" conference in New York City in 2011, Fadiman explained that with microdoses of LSD, "the rocks don't glow, even a little bit. But what many people are reporting is, at the end of the day, they say, 'That was a really good day.' You know, that kind of day when things kind of work. You're doing a task you normally couldn't stand for two hours, but you do it for three or four. You eat properly. Maybe you do one more set of reps. Just a good day."

Smith spoke to a 65-year-old Bay Area woman who has been microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms, rather than LSD, for 35 years. "I just took a tiny sliver and found that it made me alert and energized all day. I wasn't high or anything; it was more like having a coffee buzz that lasted all day long."

Indeed, author James Oroc has suggested a "secret affair between psychedelics and extreme sports," with athletes microdosing in an effort to increase their performance. Oroc rather breathlessly claims that "LSD can increase your reflex time to lightning speed, improve your balance to the point of perfection, increase your concentration until you experience 'tunnel vision,' and make you impervious to weakness or pain."

With those kind of gains, who needs bulletproof coffee? A mere 15 micrograms of LSD spread on your blueberry coffee cake muffin might just be the best part of waking up.